Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas — enough energy to heat a half-million homes for a day – is treated as waste and burned off by oil companies operating in the Bakken shale field in North Dakota.
The New York Times reports that the companies are rushing to extract oil and take advantage of the high price of crude. But in their haste the drillers often “flare off” less valuable natural gas when it bubbles up alongside the far more valuable oil.
That burning spews at least 2 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars. No other major domestic oil field currently flares nearly that much, though the practice is common in countries like Russia, Nigeria and Iran.
With few government regulations that limit the flaring, burning also is taking place in the Eagle Ford shale field in Texas, and some environmentalists and industry executives say that it could happen in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Ohio, as drilling expands.
“North Dakota is not as bad as Kazakhstan, but this is not what you would expect a civilized, efficient society to do: to flare off a perfectly good product just because it’s expensive to bring to market,” said Michael E. Webber, of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to the Times, the oil companies say economic reality is driving the flaring at Bakken, the biggest oil field discovered in the United States in four decades. They argue that they cannot afford to pay for pipelines and processing plants to capture and sell the gas.
Meanwhile, even amid the nation’s dramatic rebound in oil and gas production over the last year threes, energy industry advocates are attacking environmental regulation.
In a column in The Hill that cites the Bakken and Eagle Ford fields, Charles T. Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, writes that the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies “seem determined to impose extreme and unwarranted regulations that will do nothing significant to improve the environment – but would make U.S. refiners far less competitive with refiners in foreign lands.”
STUART SILVERSTEIN
